Our story supporting digital entrepreneurship in Colombia since 2012

In 2012, Suricata Labs didn't exist yet as a company. What existed was us, a group of people in Bucaramanga deeply involved in the first cycle of Apps.co, the program that marked Colombia's first serious bet on digital businesses. We were among the mentors trained by Bob Dorf and Alexander Osterwalder. Suricata was incorporated in April 2013, and it was born largely out of what we learned there.

Since then, more than 650 digital startups and companies from 21 departments and Bogotá have gone through our programs, and in total we have worked with more than a thousand businesses in Colombia and Central America. This piece tells that story. We wrote it because we have been part of almost every stage of the country's digital entrepreneurship policy, and because much of what we do with companies today comes from the wins and mistakes of those years.

2012: we learned to send entrepreneurs out to talk to customers

Apps.co started with a very clear methodological bet. Osterwalder opened the program's learning sessions in September 2012 and, together with Dorf, worked with about 200 people including entrepreneurs, institutions and mentors. The sessions were designed so that we mentors could replicate the method with our own entrepreneurs.

Dorf, co-author with Steve Blank of The Startup Owner's Manual, spent eight weeks working with more than a hundred entrepreneurs and mentors from across the country. For those of us coming from traditional consulting, it was a real shift in mindset. We stopped talking about forty-page business plans and started sending teams out to test their assumptions with real customers.

A study from UNAB on 25 business ideas from the program found something that stuck with us. 86% of the ideas came from a market need rather than a technological innovation, and only half of the mentors had experience in the industry they were advising. The method was the same for everyone. What made the difference was who was sitting at the table with the entrepreneur.

2013: mentors and evaluators of more than 300 ideas

Suricata got started in April 2013 with the team split between mentoring and evaluation. We were still mentors for Apps.co and Mujeres ECCO, and we were among the evaluators for MinTIC's Apps.co and for Destapa Futuro, from the Bavaria Foundation. By August of that year we had already evaluated more than 300 business ideas. During those years we were also Seed Managers for ANDI's ANDI del Futuro program.

2014 to 2016: running Apps.co and building a community in Bucaramanga

In 2014 we went from mentors to operators. We supported the Bucaramanga Chamber of Commerce in the call Colciencias opened in March of that year to run the Apps.co Growth and Consolidation phase in the city, the one that took in companies that already had sales. The Chamber became the operator, and Suricata co-led the program's fourth iteration with it, headed by Oscar Gómez, Suricata's managing director. The first group started at the end of 2014 with 15 digital companies from Santander, Norte de Santander and the Caribbean coast, and the cycle closed in May 2015.

The goal of that phase was to bring each company to break-even, and the work was done with its leadership team. It was our first school in what is now at the core of our work: helping an existing company grow with an explicit strategy. More cycles followed, and we kept supporting the phase in Bucaramanga over the following years.

In April 2014 we also organized the first Startup Date Bucaramanga with the Chamber. The second edition, in February 2015, drew more than 750 attendees, twice as many as the first. The third took place in July 2016, and the event kept going for several more years. The idea was simple: bring in digital founders who had already been down the road to share what worked for them and what didn't, in front of people from the region who were just getting started.

The raw material was there. At the time, Wayra's director in Colombia estimated that Santander accounted for about 8% of the applications they received in their digital entrepreneurship calls. What was missing was for those teams to meet each other and the market.

In April 2016 we brought our friend Venkatesh Rao to Bucaramanga to run the Breaking Smart workshop. Rao is the author of the blog ribbonfarm, and in 2014 and 2015, with support from Andreessen Horowitz, he wrote a series of essays on what Marc Andreessen's line that software is eating the world actually means in practice. The live workshop was delivered seven times across three continents in 2015 and 2016, and one of those times was in Bucaramanga.

The core argument is that when the environment changes this fast, planning and prediction lose value, and the organizations that win are the ones that experiment, ship incomplete versions and correct as they go, the way software gets built. Rao calls it perpetual beta. For us it was the same customer development logic we had been applying since 2012, taken beyond the startup to established companies and to society.

Having Rao in Bucaramanga meant that a conversation happening at the time in Silicon Valley and a handful of capitals was also taking place in a mid-sized Colombian city, with local business owners and founders at the table. It was the same conviction that led us to get entrepreneurs out of the city, only in reverse: bringing the frontier here.

#breakingsmart workshop in Bucaramanga, Colombia with @gomezoscar

@vgr

2017 to 2020: getting entrepreneurs out of Bucaramanga

2017 was our busiest year. We supported 157 digital startups from Bucaramanga, Barrancabermeja and San Gil, across the eight-week Discovery stage and the twenty-week Growth and Consolidation stage.

Those years left us with a conviction: an entrepreneur from Bucaramanga has to get out of Bucaramanga. That's why we organized the Startup Business tours to Bogotá, where teams visited customers, presented their products, opened new deals and met with well-known business leaders. In 2019 we received the Innovative Entrepreneurship award from Fenalco Santander.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, we opened a new cohort remotely. It wasn't new for us, because we had already supported companies in the program from a distance.

2021 to 2025: from Santander to half the country, and to Bogotá

In early 2021 we joined the Aceleradoras Colombia program, run with 500 Startups, and became one of the country's 30 certified accelerators.

That same year we took on the Apps.co Startup Lab in Amazonas, Caquetá, Santander, Norte de Santander, Arauca, Meta, Casanare, Vichada, Guainía, Guaviare and Vaupés, with 36 digital companies in a fully virtual process. Supporting companies spread across eleven departments with the same rigor forced us to turn into a system what used to depend on having the mentor in the room.

In 2024 we returned to the country's eastern region with PotencIA Digital, offering free workshops on digital marketing and business strengthening, open to anyone.

In 2025 we began supporting the startups at Innovalab, the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce's accelerator, with mentoring and workshops on metrics, product, growth and investment. The question that came up most was who to sell to, far more than pitching or fundraising. It's the same question Dorf put us to work on in 2012.

Where we are today

Most of our work today is with companies that already have sales and want to grow. That same work took us to Central America, where since 2021 we have been helping small businesses in the SICA region sell online and digitize their operations, including more than 200 rural businesses. At heart we're still asking the 2012 question, now to bigger companies: what does this business assume about its customer, and how do we test it quickly?

In Santander, we also came back to where we started, this time from the other side of the table. Between December 2025 and June 2026, the IDB hired us to design the technical assistance offer for the companies and startups in Santander's IT ecosystem, as part of the technical cooperation through which the Bank supports the Guatiguará Technology Park. The region is home to more than 13% of the country's IT companies, and it's the same place where in 2012 we started out mentoring teams that were only just testing their first idea.

If we've learned anything since then, it's that methodologies become common property very fast. The Canvas that was a novelty in 2012 is now taught in high school. What can't be copied is the experience of the people doing the support, which is why we keep putting people who have run businesses at the table.

In 2026 we started working with companies through Build Inside, a program where a company's own people build a digital solution for a problem that is already costing them money. In 2012 we told founders to go validate with customers before writing a single line of code. Today, AI agents let someone who knows a process get to a working first version without going through a vendor. Building has become cheaper, but verifying that it works and maintaining it when something changes costs the same as before. That's where we bring the method, so that whatever gets built has an owner with a name and a number that says whether it worked.

If you're interested in supporting the entrepreneurship ecosystem in your region, get in touch.